"Imagine a time...when color and texture played no part in fabrics, when, as Jack Lenor Larsen put it 'the insipid pale tints of the depression prevailed.' It would take a pioneering spirit to experiment with new materials and daring color
Designers
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A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes is on view at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. I had the thrill of seeing it recently, along with Jade Papa, our curator. Like many textile enthusiasts, I'd been anticipating
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Part of what makes cataloging our pieces so interesting is learning about designers who may not have big name recognition, but nevertheless made significant and often underrated contributions to textile and fashion design. One such designer who
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This summer, I tackled a project that quickly turned into an obsession. The task was to inventory our collection of American Fabrics magazines, consisting of 116 issues that date from 1947 to 1986. It’s an incredible collection of primary
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Tammis Keefe, one of the great names of handkerchief and textile design, was born in 1913 in California. Initially studying higher mathematics at Los Angeles Community College, she decided to change her major to painting at the Chouinard
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In December, legendary textile designer and innovator Jack Lenor Larsen passed away at the age of 93 at his home in East Hampton, NY. It would be difficult to overstate his contributions to textile design, particularly to the mid-20th century
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The Textile and Costume Collection is fortunate to count amongst its holdings a number of knitwear pieces from a designer dubbed the “Queen of Knits” by Women’s Wear Daily in 1968.
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Hello, it’s Gabby again. I wanted to share with everyone a collection I worked with in the spring semester of my freshman year. I was given a box full of objects created by the designer Frankie Welch. I had never heard of her, so I decided to
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The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's current exhibition, Willi Smith: Street Couture, features a jumper from our collection, part of Smith's 1984 SubUrban line.
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A trove of original designs by Edna Leonhardt, the first woman in North America to own her own textile design firm, is one of the many treasures in our Paul J. Gutman Library.